stars fading (but I linger on dear)
by brinnanza
Summary: Hawkeye's voice drifts through the stillness of the tent in the dark, sharp, but with a brittle edge. "I don't regret it." (A coda for 7x22 Preventative Medicine, Hawkeye/BJ)


Hawkeye's voice drifts through the stillness of the tent in the dark, sharp, but with a brittle edge. "I don't regret it."

BJ considers pretending he's asleep already. OR had gone on and on, casualties breaking in constant waves on the shore. It's late, or maybe it's early now. They say truth is the first casualty of war, but BJ thinks it's really time - when you stop counting minutes because they all blur together and you stop counting days because you forget that the sun rises and sets, doesn't just go on and on and on like the bright white lights in OR.

He rolls onto his back and stares up at the canvas ceiling of the tent, a slightly different shade of dark than his closed eyes. Hawkeye knows his breathing too well by now for a believable fiction. "Are you telling me or yourself?"

Hawkeye's cot creaks as he shifts, and BJ imagines he can feel Hawkeye's eyes on him, wide and reflecting scraps of moonlight like a cat's. "Does it matter?"

 _Yes_ , BJ doesn't say. What happens to Colonel Lacy is of little consequence to him, but there are only so many dark corners a mind can sustain, and Hawkeye's already got more than his fair share. BJ can twist himself into knots trying to be appalled and outraged and all the other things he knows he should be, but he's been here long enough to know blood and war and death had sunk their hooks into Hawkeye long before BJ arrived in Korea. There's only so much either of them can do to stem the bleeding.

BJ lets out a long, slow breath."No, Hawk, I don't suppose it does." He already knows the answer anyway.

What passes for stillness here is the faint crunch of boots on gravel, distant artillery, crickets chirping, blissfully unaware that a war is no place to fall in love. Floyd had taught him once how to tell the temperature by the crickets - count the chirps in fourteen seconds and add forty, but only if it's warmer than 55 or so. If it's colder than that, the crickets won't sing.

It hadn't been much more than a novelty at the time, but BJ counts them now, a steady rhythm that plays alongside the rise and fall of Hawkeye's breaths. Maybe if BJ counts them instead, the number of silent breaths between sentences will tell him how cold it is in Hawkeye, too.

"We're supposed to treat the symptoms," Hawkeye says finally, what passes for still too quiet to bear. "When there's nothing we can do, we still try to keep them comfortable. We do what we can."

"It's not the same thing." Hawkeye thinks because it hurts, it means the pieces are still there, that parts of him haven't been ripped away by what he thinks is right, but BJ knows it's just a phantom pain. He's held too many lives in his hands tonight for a futile argument, but there has to be a place they don't cross. "What about do no harm?"

"It's too late for that, Beej." Hawkeye's cot creaks again as he rolls onto his back, and BJ turns his head to watch Hawkeye's shadowed figure. "There's nothing but harm here, and I'm already guilty of too much of it."

"If it's absolution you're after, you'd be better off going to Father Mulcahy. He's got a professional obligation to forgive." BJ's grateful for the dark, that he can't see the way Hawkeye's mouth tightens at the corners at his unkind tone.

"I'm not."

"Then what _are_ you after?" It comes out more sharply than BJ had intended, but he's too tired to play the game. Pulling the truth out of Hawkeye is like searching for hidden shrapnel in a leg wound - it's delicate, difficult work, and sometimes there isn't time to do anything but amputate.

He can practically hear Hawkeye put his guard up. "I'm not after anything. I'm just saying."

"And you couldn't wait to 'just say' until the morning?"

"Fine, fine," Hawkeye says in a fair approximation of his typical blasé tone that nonetheless does little to hide his pique. "Off you go to the land of Nod. I'm just saying, if I had the choice again, I'd do the exact same thing."

" _Great_ ," BJ snaps, no longer bothering to mask his own irritation. There's a sharp ache in his head above one eye, like he'd taken some shrapnel himself, and he just wants to forget about this god awful place for a few hours, check out so he doesn't have to keep seeing torn up kids behind his eyes. "I'm glad you find it so easy to live with yourself because I'm finding it a little difficult at the moment."

"So go move into Post-Op," Hawkeye says. "There might even be a spare bed thanks to me."

"And we're all _so grateful_ , Doctor Schweitzer," says BJ. The words come out scalpel-sharp and cruel, and he's not sure he's even sorry. That might be the worst part.

His breath catches, and suddenly the thing he misses most isn't Peg or Erin or regular hours, but the sight of ocean waves rolling over the shore, smoothing the rough edges of so many broken things.

Of course Hawkeye can't leave well enough alone, can't leave a conversation without one last quip. "You should be grateful," he says without a shred of irony, and something white-hot and angry bubbles up in BJ's chest, burning holes through the remains of his patience.

"I'm not gonna help you punish yourself either," BJ says. His voice has a hard edge that he can't bring himself to regret. Hawkeye's conscience isn't his responsibility - it's hard enough to shoulder his own, to drag himself through the mud and the blood and still be able to look at himself in the mirror. "You wanna keep lying to yourself, fine, but find someone else's fist to throw yourself against."

"I'm not." BJ snorts. "I'm _not_!"

BJ draws in a breath and lets it out slowly, the heavy press of exhaustion cooling the anger simmering in his gut and washing it out of his words. "Hawkeye, I'm tired," he says evenly. "I knitted a whole ward of wooden soldiers today, and I'm probably going to have to do the same thing tomorrow. I would really like to get some sleep in between."

Silence lingers in the space between them. "I'm not trying to punish myself," Hawkeye says, so soft that it's barely audible across the tent. "I'm not."

Sunrise is creeping over the horizon, scarlet that spills down from the sky into the mud and drips into the tent. If BJ turns to his side, he can just begin to make out Hawkeye on the other side of the tent, bathed in shadow. The crickets are quiet with the dawn, and something in BJ settles too.

"Alright," he says. "Come on."

Hawkeye picks his way across the tent and perches on the edge of BJ's cot like a sparrow that can't decide whether or not to flee. BJ tugs on the hem of his shirt, and he glances nervously toward the wan light slipping under the door. "It'll be morning soon."

"It's alright; we're nocturnal." BJ says. "Come on."

With another glance at the door, Hawkeye finally slides into the cot. His back is to BJ's chest, face hidden under the mop of his hair, and BJ counts the silent breaths that rise and fall between them.

"I don't hate you," Hawkeye says after a while in a voice too quiet for even this early hour.

"I know," BJ says.

"You're the only thing I don't hate."

 _Too cold._ Even here, there should be more on that list, but the safety of cool shadows is being consumed by the light, and it will have to wait for a more honest hour. "Charles will be so disappointed."

Hawkeye huffs out a laugh, and BJ presses an answering curve of lips to the back of Hawkeye's neck, just above the chain of his dog tags.

Maybe tonight BJ will teach him how to tell the temperature with the crickets.


End file.
